Chinese Homebuyers Spreading Wealth Make Vancouver Pricier Than Manhattan

Broseph Friday 1 Feb 2013

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2013/01/31/the-sting/

Alex Saturday 2 Feb 2013

I know people who bought at the peak of the market. They are gonna be pissed when the market crashes.

Broseph Friday 12 Jul 2013

The data only goes to 2010, but I can only image what it would look like if you included the next two years.

http://www.theeconomicanalyst.com/content/examining-house-prices-and-income-growth-canada-part-1

Broseph Saturday 20 Jul 2013

Days ago the realtors’ national body said sales in June crawled higher from May, and were a little less than last June. Here is how it was reported by the MSM:

Residential real estate heat up in June (Global)
Canadian housing market rebounds in June (CBC)
Canadian home sales improve in June (Canada NewsWire)
Foreigners still see bullish on Canadian Real Estate (Wall Street Journal)
Home sales bounce back, but a rate test lies ahead (Globe)
Canadian home sales inch upwards (Toronto Star)
Calgary price growth for repeat home sales among best in Canada (Calgary Herald)

Well, you get the picture. The house-pumping never stops. And as more media outlets lose money and fire reporters, press releases from outfits like CREA or Royal LePage become news stories, with headlines and bylines slapped on. That suits the realtors just fine. But the death of journalism, as we knew it, robs people of dissenting or differing voices, making life more dangerous.

Media outlets losing money, which intensifies the need to fabricate stories that people want to hear to increase and sustain readership/viewership.

Broseph Tuesday 15 Oct 2013

Another anecdote from Garth. http://www.greaterfool.ca/2013/10/15/expert-opinion/

Broseph Wednesday 30 Oct 2013

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...-scrutiny/article15107922/#dashboard/follows/

Accuracy of Canada’s housing data under scrutiny

When the real estate association cooks numbers, they're innocent because RE prices go up forever! When someone trading on the stock market has their books completely open to inspection and only invests with his own money and not other people's money, he's a crook.

Broseph Sunday 2 Feb 2014

bump.

some snippets from this article: http://mises.ca/posts/articles/canadas-tidal-wave-of-credit/

One reason for this is that the Bank of Canada has been flushing the economy with money. As recently as 2009 the BoC increased the narrow money supply by nearly 15%, and the annual growth rate has fallen hardly below 10% at any point in the last decade. The tidal wave of cash that the Bank injects into the Canadian economy has to go somewhere, and bank lending is the ultimate destination. Easy credit for Canadian consumers has been the common outcome through the last decade, fueling a spending and borrowing binge.
Indeed, while the Bank of Canada controls the discount rate, consumer borrowing is also concerned with the effects of inflation. Prices for some big ticket items like fuel and housing climbing rapidly over the past few years have brought price inflation higher than the cost of borrowing.

When a consumer borrows, he is concerned with the real interest rate. This measures how much he will have to pay back once the effects of the lost purchasing power of his dollar are accounted for. Once we adjust the BoC’s discount rate for inflation we see that borrowers got a free lunch over the past four
years. A negative rate implies that you actually earn money by borrowing money! Since the value of the dollar falls faster (due to inflation) than the increase in the amount you will have to pay back (due to the Bank of Canada controlled interest rate), you will be paying back less money in the future than you borrowed today.
Any rational person would do exactly what Canadians have done over the past decade: borrow and spend! After all, the more you borrow the more money you make. That is, until the bills come due or interest rates rise.

Negative real interest rates basically cause there to be real infinite demand in borrowing, as borrowed funds could be use to invest in assets that appreciate greater than the nominal interest rate. On the flipside, lenders don't want to loan out so this causes a decrease in the supply of funds.

Providing more loans, especially consumer credit, can boost aggregate demand. Keynesian economics prescribes this. An oversight of this theory is that lenders aren't willing to lend when there is no return on their end, so you can actually get a credit shock in the real credit markets. Despite the BoC's dumping of money into the market, the TSX has barely moved in the last 4 years. This means that the money has moved into markets other than the stock market: housing and consumer credit.

I don't know how well this is sourced, but many of the stats I run into put Canadian household debt:income at a level even higher than what was peak in the US.

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Slavoj Zizek Tuesday 4 Feb 2014

Crack Shack or Mansion?

Can you tell a Vancouver mansion from a crack shack? See what $1 million buys in Vancouver.

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SweetLeftFoot Wednesday 5 Feb 2014

Also, about the last form of viable print advertising is housing related. Be it actual listings, but more often than not soft features that are essentially advertorial for "owning your own home" about how to decorate it, how to entertain in it etc, that attract ads from companies that flog the stuff you allegedly "need" for this.

I'm not against the principle of home ownership in any regard but the only time I'll buy a house is if I'm seriously going to settle down and have a family.

Then I won't be buying it as an "investment" or looking to make short term gains on it, but rather it will first and foremost somewhere to live and provide that security for my family.

SweetLeftFoot Monday 24 Feb 2014

I see Canada has taken steps on this, which will have a direct impact on Oz.

http://www.theage.com.au/business/c...-from-canada-to-australia-20140224-33ca8.html

Chinese Homebuyers Spreading Wealth Make Vancouver Pricier Than Manhattan

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